Word of the Week - 42

Van Morrison sings "Caravan" from the Martin Scorsese documentary THE LAST WALTZ.  Van the Man.  Wholehearted.  Not a lukewarm performance to be found in the whole blessed movie. 

Word of the Week - ARDENT

It is the Solstice night as I write this, time of the new moon, beginning of the return of the light.  We have been reminded throughout the day about setting our minds to new ways of being, of doing.  If we remain or become ardent, how can we go wrong.  Ardent, fervent, passionate.  Aflame, unbounded, electric, aglow, burning.

Music and musicians, color and color and color.  Tepid is not the temperature we require to carry us across winter's dark expanse.  Caliente, all spice and tang, flavor and, again, color.  We cannot find our way by candles too dim.  What we need is emphatic, even extreme.  We will not melt our own frozen beliefs without turning up the heat.  Our rigid joints will not loosen without a glow that matches the sun.

If luggage can be ardent, here it is.

Yes, I covet this vintage English watercolor box.  I covet it ardently.

Oh, fortunate possessor.

Oaxaca pillows.

On the longest night of the year, even Los Angeles yearns for a hearth with warming flames.  Heat in its dazzling manifestations expands us, will not let us shrink nor be less than we are.

Can't whistle? Try this.

Kaffe Fassett needlepoint.

As my whistle is nearly inaudible, I've decided that color, ingesting, absorbing, overdosing and immersing myself in it, is my equivalent of whistling to keep spirits up.  I have a cellular response to it, the greater the profusion, the more strongly I feel it.  Color gives me pangs, but only in the best sense.

When he was much younger, my son would describe himself by saying, "I feel a bit dreary" when he was in the process of becoming ill.  He is descended from two generations that read way too much Edward Gorey.  Dreary doesn't get me in a choke-hold the way it once did but living the human experience can ambush us with disheartening moments, frequently brought on by our own minds and not specific external events.  Thus we seek avenues of cheer upon which we can be reminded that there is a sunny side of the street, regardless of what's going on (gestures with head) over there.

What happens to me is that I can forget the simple, accessible, free and non-food things that make me happy, forget them as though they never existed.  Wait! I exclaim to myself.  How did I not remember the way certain voices or instruments, lyrics, types of music produce pangs of joy?  It is not just age, it is not amnesia, though I think amnesia must feel a bit like it.  For a variety of reasons, I think we wander away from ourselves.  Fatigue produces a mental fog, as does pain, illness, lack of sleep, distraction, any of the naturally lower points that occur as we undulate our way, up and down, through the days.

I don't believe there is anyone completely immune to a sagging spirit.  It need not last long nor arrive often.  Just a state that is brightened (in my case literally), lightened by what delights us most.  For reasons too vague to ponder, we only just began watching the second season of HBO's series, TREME.  In the first episodes we saw last night there was a singer with a Sam Cooke voice and there was Lucia Micarelli, singing and playing the violin - heart-breakingly, again in the best sense.

Even when there is nary a shadow to remind us that darker moments do exist, what could be the harm in filling up on our favorite fizzy lifting drinks?  Based on very old business, I can tend to be stingy with myself, ration the sources of joyfulness as though they would run out or I was not fully deserving.  For this instant and, I hope, many instants to follow, I will be lavish, I will spoil myself with color and music, with beauty and every gleaming ray of life affirmed that I can find.  Why would we do less?  Take heart and we will dance together beneath a Kaffe Fassett-imagined sky.  Yes, I think the band has started.

Pattern, pattern, pattern

Not apologizing for stating again that beauty nourishes me.  One of its most pleasing-to-me forms is a mix of multiple patterns and colors.  The paintings of Japanese artist Naomi Okubo, discovered just this past week, are visual feasts that explain far better than words the effect pattern, pattern and pattern have on me.

Another artist who blends what seem to be disparate prints in a thoroughly pleasing way is Kaffe Fassett, long considered a glorious expert in knitting, quilting, painting and the decorative arts.

When I stumble upon or am introduced the work of an artist whose pattern, shall we say appreciation matches my own I feel as though the most fun, interesting and slightly edgy child has just moved in next door and wants to be my newest friend.  I am a lucky girl.

Visitors in the land of the magic bus

Is it the Puritan Ethic that plants itself between our child-like inclinations for bright fancy and the manifestation of vehicles such as the trucks and buses of Pakistan?  Seeing my first episode of Michael Palin's BBC series, HIMALAYA, last night I was seized by a strong hankering, not experienced until now, to know a culture in which we could travel about surrounded by walls of image and color and be considered normal.  Ken Kesey did stand out in a crowd.

The Merry Pranksters, on the road in America.

Pakistani bus/truck art.  Photo copyright Umair Mohsin.  More photos here.

I've watched many of Palin's travel series, admiring his ease in discomfiting situations, his lack of resistance to the range and diversity of this planet and its life forms.  Though, as he admits in an introductory promo, their stays are brief, he and his crew introduce us to distant communities, intentionally revealing them as our fellows, not as curiosities.  He expresses concern that the mere presence of outsiders may change a way of life and not for the better.

In this episode, we're invited to see a polo match and festival for 10,000 villagers, held on a plain more than 12,000 feet up.  Not having traveled outside my home state all that much, I find something within me expands as I am introduced to my world on a wider scale.   Like a visit to the Planetarium,  an armchair journey alters the scale of what I think I know.  Rather than feeling diminished by my own minor participation in a whole too big to comprehend, I experience a sense of connectedness to the remote, even the infinite.

One of the two languages I speak is color.  When I find it appreciated, applied in ways not seen on the streets of Los Angeles,  I take notice.  While I seem to be descended from people of a more limited palette, my years of sunshine, oranges, hydrangeas, hibiscus and geraniums in red clay pots have caused a mutation. What about marigold as the base color for my Honda?  It seems a good place to begin.